paper organization

Ahmed Rahhali

Grad 695

Weekly journal #7

The training programs for delivery drivers have to improve the behavior of drivers not focusing on impending hazards but having long glances inside their vehicles and this is what at the end of the day leads to crashes and accidents. Up to the moment no program had been able to change the real frequency of crashes and citations. This program that was proven to reduce crashes it was only administered once during the time that license was issued, and it only took 17 minutes to complete this program. The training program addressed both attention maintenance skills and hazard anticipation, Distractology 101, and it was established that all these aspects took twice the time if the program had only hazard anticipation. At the same time, it is important to understand the fact that delivery drivers were under and inflated risk if crashing than any other driver, especially if they had just the regular drive training and education (Williams 2003). Just as any other driver, distraction/ attention loss has been a significant contributor to the road crashes registered, and most specifically in teens it has caused almost 58% of the crashes. Therefore, one reason that seems to explain this phenomenon of inflated crashes among young drivers, is the willingness to engage in activities that are distractive during driving, or while on the road. These activities are mostly related to technology related activities such as cell phones text messaging or conversations (Young et al. 2010). A survey carried out on driver-cell phone use while driving showed that 43% of drivers of the age 18 to 24 years, have used their cell phones while driving specifically texting, which is a he percentage as compared to elderly drivers whereby drivers between the age of 30 to 59 only 12% of them have texted while driving. Whereby this explains one aspect that most of the Accidents and Crashes are registered under drivers who are young, maybe due to inexperience or other influences like distraction through cell phone text messaging.

Additionally, hazard anticipation has been considered the other reason that such individuals register high crashes and accidents. That is in his case the hazard can be the pedestrian is potential or latent because in most of the cases the pedestrian will not emerge. A good example whereby a minivan might be parked uphill, this automatically obstructs the view of the driver coming from behind and will see the pedestrian approaching the crosswalk. The failure of hazard anticipation has been linked to increased crash risk and accidents. Therefore, with proper training on avoidance of distraction and hazard anticipation will help the delivery drivers to be involved in a lot of crashes and accidents. This is because the young drivers up to the moment have been thought to be careless and not clueless, which means that their hazard anticipation was less developed than the experience drivers, who register less crashes and accidents as mentioned before.

The Distractology 101 program has proven to be effective, according to Zhang et al. 2016, they were able to conduct a research on about 28 ,000 young drivers who had less than three years of driving experience. The training program had two distinct training periods which were conducted under the presence of an experimenter. The following table gives the summary of the training that was mainly based on the two aspects mentioned above distraction (D) and Hazard Anticipation (HA).

Summary of the Training Scenarios in the Distractology 101 program (HA, D)

Hidden Stop Sign after curve in the road (HA)

Marked mid-Block crosswalk with pedestrian obscured by cars (HA)

Oncoming Truck making a left turn, while participant turns left (HA) Left turn onto one-way street with pedestrian crossing (HA)

Sudden hand-braking vehicle in front of participant rural road (D)

Sudden hand-braking in front of participant urban road (D)

The crashes and accidents were measured over a one-year period for both control and experimental groups. The results were taken before and after the participants had taken the Distractology 101 program.

Number of Drivers who had crashes and Drivers who did not have crashes

	Crash	Number	Total
Distractology program drivers	99 9.61%	740 71.84%	839
Control Drivers in the experiment	4,000 14.85%	22,932 85.15%	26,932
Total	4,099	23,672	27,771

This study showed the effectiveness of the training program, the Distractology 101 program, that was based on real life, actual driving experiment. Looking at the crashes and infractions based on the hazard anticipation and distraction elements of the program. The program proved to be effective, in improving the skills of the targeted drivers, it is still unclear if the training was actually the reason for the reduction in the accidents and crash risks. Whereby the evidence in this case provides adequate data that Distractology 101 program has a positive effect on developing safer young drivers, therefore if it was to be initiated in Delivery driver training then the it will positively impact the rate of the crashes and the accidents. Therefore, such programs should be extended to all novice drivers.

References

Williams, A. F. (2003). Teenage drivers: patterns of risk. Journal of safety research, 34(1), 5-15.

Young, K. L., & Lenné, M. G. (2010). Driver engagement in distracting activities and the strategies used to minimise risk. Safety Science, 48(3), 326-332.

Zhang, T., Li, J., Thai, H., Zafian, T., Samuel, S., & Fisher, D. L. (2016, September). Evaluation of the effect of a novice driver training program on citations and crashes. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 1991-1995). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.